Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Tuesday, 24 June 2008 11:22
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 2
VGChartz is a site that lists sales figures for video games sold around
the world. It’s taken as gospel by sites such as the New York Times,
Forbes, Fortune, the New York Post and others – but Gamasutra explains
why relying on its figures may be a mistake.
One cool thing about
VGChartz is that it lists a lot of information about video game and console sales, and all that data is free.
Free is very cool, but respected gaming website Gamasutra has
published a long piece of why free might not, in this case, mean accurate.
Turns out that VGChartz has been making a lot of educated guesses for sales figures, with one prime example being the sales for the game Ironman.
During month of May, VGChartz had estimated that only 53,000 sales had been made. But when market research firm NPD came out with sales figures of 130,000 for May, VGChartz later changed its estimate for May sales without making any reference to the fact it had synchronised its projections with the hard data from NPD, who gets sales figures from retailers.
Disclosing when data has changed and why is important if anyone is going to take your figures seriously, as well as making it very clear that your figures can be estimates, rather than hard facts.
After all, if you quote VGChartz figures, and then have then changed on your in the future without explanation, it makes it very hard to trust VGChartz data in the future as you’ll never exactly know when it will change, or why.
Amongst a lot of other analysis on VGChartz which is definitely worth reading in full, Gamasutra also looked at the fact VCGhartz had breathlessly announced in a press release to the media that "VGChartz can exclusively reveal that first day sales of Metal Gear Solid 4, released on June 12th 2008 in most major markets worldwide, were an impressive 1.3 million units."
But where did this number come from? Continued on page 2.
